


The Morning Sun: A Love Story in Five Parts

by raspberryhunter



Category: True Faith - New Order (Song)
Genre: Bittersweet, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Zombie Pseudoscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 12:12:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1818025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surely she would be able to solve it, to figure out how to cure the zombie disease. But there wasn't enough <i>time</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Morning Sun: A Love Story in Five Parts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thursday_Next](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thursday_Next/gifts).



> thaaaaank you to my beta for an extremely last-minute beta! (And for enabling zombie pseudoscience!)

1.  
They met in high school. He was in the proper district; she had been bused in as part of an effort, so she had read somewhere or another, to provide better educational opportunities to those who lived in her area. 

They quickly learned that they were the only two in their classes who could keep up with each other. Their classmates were some of the smartest in the city, but the two of them were arguing about compact sets and virtual gene manipulation while the others were still plodding along with trigonometry and learning the bases of DNA.

She never invited him to her home. She could not bear for him to see the small dingy apartment where she and her mother lived: the threadbare carpet, the flickering lights their landlord was too cheap to replace.

She went to his house frequently for study dates, where they fought about elliptic curves and genemod pathways (and occasionally tried to get their actual homework done). It was a huge house, easily ten times the size of her apartment, kept immaculate by a staff of cleaners, gardeners, and who knew who else. 

His family took her to plays with them; to the opera; to scientific lectures. A whole new world opened to her, because of them. 

“Thank you,” his mother told her once, “for being my son’s friend.” She didn’t understand. Surely she was the one who should be grateful.

2.  
A chance remark in the school hallways about the “zombie kid” tipped her off. She confronted him: the look on his face gave her the answer.

The disease had been named after the first researchers who discovered and then rapidly succumbed to it -- Nielsen-Aaronson Disease -- but everyone called it the zombie virus. And no wonder, really: after a highly variable incubation period in the body, ranging from months to many years, the virus produced gradual disintegration of body and mind over a number of years, accelerating over time, combined with bloodlust as the body adapted to desire only human flesh as its sustenance.

Strangely and shockingly, they were hard to kill. Bullets would not stop them; neither would stab wounds. Most died terribly by starvation, but often not until they had infected or killed others with their bite.

He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the year before she had met him. He had been bitten by a rogue zombie who had escaped from her confinement. His family had spent all they could on experimental therapies, but no one really knew how to stop it.

All they had, in the end, was hope. So they hoped that he would be one of the cases who took years rather than months. His youth was on his side; so was his overall health. But it was only a matter of time.

3.  
Three months before they were to start as freshmen at Harvard (she with financial aid and loans, he with his 529-plan funds), the tremors started. He had to stay home. No institution would take a person infected with the zombie virus who was starting to show any symptoms at all, even though it would be years until the bloodlust took over his brain.

She said, “I’ll figure it out. I will. I promise.” Harvard was doing the most cutting-edge zombie virus research. She’d already corresponded with several labs about working there. She already had enough research under her belt, thanks to connections she’d made through his family, that she was sure she could immediately start making progress.

He nodded.

When she came home for summer vacation -- briefly, between one failed research project and the next -- he tried to kiss her. She shied away from him. She did not think she would ever forget the look in his eyes as he saw her flinch.

“It’s because of this thing, isn’t it?” he said harshly. “This thing that’s in my body, the thing that I’m becoming.”

“No,” she said, and ran out of words. That wasn’t it at all. She knew the statistics, the disease progression timeline, as well as anyone in the world; she knew that he was still himself, that he was no danger to her, at least not now, not yet.

It was that she didn’t know if she could keep her promise. There was too much to learn, too much to figure out. And there was not enough time to do it in.

4.  
She had graduated from college, had enrolled in a doctorate program, hardly paying attention to how she applied and got in, or to any of the people around her, as long as it gave her more lab time, more computer time, more ways to try to solve the problem.

In the meantime, his hands had turned from shaking into almost-rigid claws that he could move only with difficulty. His once-superior intellect had decayed, become sluggish and slow; it was still him inside, but he could no longer talk of mathematics or literature the way he once had.

She was out of time. It was a matter of weeks now, not months or years. Next week, or the week after, his brain would begin the accelerated descent. The bloodlust he was keeping in check would rage out of control. The last time she had seen him, she had seen him restrain himself from biting her arm. The next time, she could not be sure he would be able to stop himself.

And she wept, for she knew that she had failed, that she had not saved him.

She sat in his parents' garden with him that evening and told him all she had done, all she could do for him. She could not cure the zombie virus. All she could do was to create a drug that built into the virus a light sensitivity, so that the rays of the sun would disintegrate him, so that with one moment of exposure to the morning sun he would be done forever.

She waited for his anger. And instead he smiled. “You have saved me,” he said. With effort he was able to keep his voice clear and unslurred. “Given me a peaceful death, saved me from becoming – from doing this to anyone else—“ He turned away, and she knew he was thinking of the zombie who had infected him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve taken your life, all the years you could have been doing something else – and for what? For selfish reasons, for myself. I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said, “this was my choice.” And she carefully touched his ruined hand; carefully, so that he would not try reflexively to bite her.

5.  
In one quick motion, he drank all the drug from the small vial.

“I feel extraordinary,” he said, and smiled at her.


End file.
